The Grapes of Wrath

The back cover of the book by John Steinbeck has the writer's quote: " I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied". I found this quote so intriguing that I ended up buying this book instead of the other Steinbeck book (East of Eden) that I had set out to buy that day. I must say The Grapes of Wrath left me with similar feelings that his novella Of Mice and Men had left me with earlier .. sad, dissatisfied and a bit depressed.

The Grapes .. chronicles the journey of the Joads - a farmer family from Oklahoma, who drive hundreds of miles to California in search of greener pastures (in the form of a steady job and food for the family) during the Great Depression. The transformation each person in the family goes through, while battling hunger, deaths and misery; is beautifully captured. The author has also described the principles of demand and supply (availability of farm laborers and their wages) and capitalization (large corporates controlling farm produces and in turn, making small farmers broke) in a very simple way. He even writes the conversations exactly the way an Oklahoma farmer would speak - somepin for something, purty for pretty, ast for ask .. and such like :)

It definitely is a great read if one is not looking for a they-lived-happily-ever-after kind of a story.

Forgotten!

I hate it when I try so hard to remember the name of someone or something (song/ movie/ book/ place) and my memory fails me. I have been trying to remember the name of a book I had read few years ago. It had a teenage Indian girl as the main protagonist who was born in a slum/brothel of Calcutta (or was it Mumbai?) and was then adopted by a young and kind British lady. She had a short name like Mira or Radha or Gita. The story was quite interesting and in the end the girl ends up murdering the British lady's boyfriend (or probably husband?) accidentally. Also, the girl had some Afghani/Arabian connection. The book was not by an Indian author as far as I remember.

I want to buy that book, but I have no clue what its name was!! Sigh, age is finally catching up with me :(

image courtesy: http://www.democracycellproject.net/

One Hundred Years of Solitude

"The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point."

From Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I knew I was going to enjoy the book after reading that beautiful line in the first page. I had planned to read it soon after finishing his Love in the Time of Cholera last year, but managed to buy it only during my trip to Hyderabad last month.

Image: http://www.harperacademic.com/

Love in the time of Cholera

Finished reading 'Love in the time of Cholera' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez couple of days ago. I don't think anything I write about it would do justice to the book. All I can say is the book makes you feel like falling in love .. all over again.

The language is quite old-fashioned and I even had to look up some of the words to get their meaning right :) and some pages even made me lose interest for a little while. But overall a masterpiece .. a must read. Someone recommended 'One hundred years of Solitude' by Garcia Marquez, so that's definitely on my list now.

(Photo: www.norweld.lib.oh.us)

On my reading platter

Thanks to my three day holiday at work, I managed to finish Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men' yesterday and start Salinger's 'The Catcher in the Rye'. The work schedule had been crazy past couple of weeks otherwise I had planned to finish Of mice and men in a single sitting.

I have been on a book-buying spree last couple of months and have gathered quite a few books that I had always wanted to read. I have enough books to keep me busy for the next 2 months at least. Next on my reading list is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' followed by either Orwell's 1984 or P Sainath's 'Everybody Loves a Good Drought'. I need to buy Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' next as I had borrowed it from Renuka and only half-finished it in Charlotte before returning to India. Nothing hurts more than a half-finished book ..

And I hate to stack the books on my table (the way I have done right now) or for that matter tuck them away in cupboards or cartons. That's why the only furniture I have made mandatory for my room when we move into our new home later this year - is a huge bookshelf. And I have already started planning which book would fit where :)

Animal Farm - by Orwell

I just finished reading George Orwell's Animal Farm. It was a brilliant piece of writing, one of the best that I have managed to lay my hands on in recent times. It was a poignant satire on rise and fall of communism depicted through the lives of animals inhabiting a farm in an English countryside. The concept of communism in its true sense is great - with equality for everyone being its core principle. But how it fails in implementation such that in the end it is hard to tell friends from enemies and people fail to distinguish if they were more miserable before or after embracing communism ('Animalism' in the book).

The book is full of symbolism - each character depicts someone/something (primarily in the context of USSR). A brief description of Animal Farm symbolism/interpretation can be found here. The author brilliantly portrays the dissolution of principles - from the seven commandments changing over time as per the convenience of the so-called leaders. 'No animal shall sleep in a bed' becoming 'No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets', 'No animal shall drink alcohol' to 'No animal shall drink alcohol in excess' and 'No animal shall kill another animal' becoming 'No animal shall kill another animal without cause'. And in the end it is replaced by one single profound all-encompassing commandment "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others".

If God was a Banker

I finished reading 'If God was a Banker' by Ravi Subramanian today. I had been reading this book for a while now - few weeks, that is, ever since I finished reading the extremely well-written 'The Kite Runner'. I think I will write a full-fledged review of The Kite Runner some time soon.

It took me unusually long to finish If God... Partly because of lack of time in the past few weeks and partly because the book failed to grab my attention/interest for over an hour at a stretch. Today I made a resolve to finish it as I needed to start George Orwell's Animal Farm. If God .. is a forgettable kind of book - a fiction about the professional and personal lives of young and ambitious bankers working for multi-national banks in India. The writer himself is a banker and his characters & storyline are pretty much reflections of his own life. In fact Vandu & CD, who know the author personally, say that Subramanian has portrayed himslef as the all-good-no-evil character of Swami and another of his peers is the 'inspiration' for the other protagonist smart-but-slimy Sundeep.

The author goes on an on about the nitty-gritties of sales in banking industry, describing each selling campaign & business operation in great detail. This may appeal to someone from the industry, but to an outsider (like me), it's nothing but boring stuff. And when he is not writing about banking/sales, he is writing sleaze. It seemed to me that I was reading a Shobha De piece with some banking jargon thrown in. The point where Subramanian scores is the narrative - it is simple and the conversations are very real.

But overall, this book can be better left unread and that wouldn't be any loss at all!